the whisky you can fool your pa, you are wrong. Your pa in his day ate
three carloads of cardamon seeds and cloves and used listerine by the
barrel. He knew which was the creaky step on the stairs in his father's
house and used to avoid it coming in at night, just as you do now, and
he knows just what you are doing. More than that, your pa speaks from
the bitterest kind of experience when he pleads with you to quit. It is
no goody-goody talk of a mutton-headed old deacon that he is giving you;
it has taken him a year to get his courage up to speak to you, and every
word that he speaks is boiled out of an agony of bitter memories. He
knows where boys that start as you are starting end if they don't turn
back. Your pa turned, but he recollects the career of the Blue boys, who
are divided between the penitentiary, the poor-house and the southwest
corner of hell; he recalls the Winklers--one dead, one a porter in a
saloon in Peoria, one crazy; and he looks at you, and it seems to him
that he must take you in his arms as he did when you were a little child
in the prairie fire, and run to safety with you. And when he talks to
you with his bashful, halting speech, you just sit there and grin, and
cut his heart to its core, for he knows you do not understand.
"It's rather up to you, Bub. In the next few months you will have to
decide whether or not you are going to hell. Of course the 'vilest
sinner may return' at any point along the road--but to what? To
shattered health; to a mother heart-broken in her grave; to a wife
damned to all eternity by your thoughtless brutality; and to children
who are always afraid to look up the alley, when they see a group of
boys, for fear they may be teasing you--you, drunk and dirty, lying in
the stable filth! To that you will 'return,' with your strength spent,
and your sportive friends, gone to the devil before you, and your chance
in life frittered away.
"Just sit down and figure it out, Bub. Of course there are a lot of good
fellows on the road to hell; you will have a good time going; but you'll
be a long time there. You'll dance and play cards and chase out nights,
and soak your soul in the essence of don't-give-a-dam-tiveness, and
you'll wonder, as you go up in the balloon, what fun there is in walking
through this sober old earth. Friends--what are they? The love of
humanity--what is it? Thoughtfulness to those about you? Gentility--What
are these things? Letteroll--letteroll! But as you drop out of the
balloon, the earth will look like a serious piece of landscape.
"When you are old, the beer you have swilled will choke your throat; the
women you have flirted with will hang round your feet and make you
stumble. All the nights you have wasted at poker will dim your eyes. The
garden of the days that are gone, wherein you should have planted
kindness and consideration and thoughtfulness and manly courage to do
right, will be grown up to weeds, that will blossom in your patches and
in your rags and in your twisted, gnarly face that no one will love.
"Go it, Bub! don't stop for your pa's sake; you know it all. Your pa is
merely an old fogy. Tell him you can paddle your own canoe. But when you
were a little boy, a very little boy, with a soft, round body, your pa
used to take you in his arms and rub his beard--his rough, stubby,
three-days' beard--against your face and pray that God would keep you
from the path you are going in.
"And so the sins of the father, Bub--but we won't talk of that."
Three months later, when the Methodists opened their regular winter
revival, Mehronay, becoming enraged at what he called the tin-horn
clothes of the travelling evangelist conducting the meetings, began to
make fun of him in the paper; and, as a revivalist in a church is a
sacred person while the meetings are going on, we had to kill Mehronay's
items about the revival; whereupon, his professional pride being hurt,
Mehronay went forth into the streets, got haughtily drunk, and strutted
up and down Main Street scattering sirs and misters and madams about so
lavishly that men who did not appreciate his condition thought he had
gone mad. That night he went to the revival, and sat upon the back seat
alone, muttering his imprecations at the preacher until the singing
began, when the heat of the room and the emotional music mellowed his
pride, and he drowned out the revivalist's singing partner with a
clear, sweet tenor that made the congregation turn to look at him.
Mehronay knew the gospel hymns by heart, as he seemed to know his New
Testament, and the cunning revivalist kept the song service going for an
hour. When Mehronay was thoroughly sober there was a short prayer, and
the singer on the platform feelingly sang "There Were Ninety and Nine"
with an adagio movement, and Mehronay's face was wet with tears and he
rose for prayers.
He came to the office chastened and subdued next morning and wrote an
account of the revival so eulogistic that we had to tone it down, and
for a week he went about damning, with all the oaths in the pirate's
log, Dan Gregg and the College professor who taught evolution. But no
one could coax him back to the revival. As spring came we thought that
he had forgotten the episode of his regeneration, and perhaps he had
forgotten it, but the Saturday before Easter he put on the copy-hook an
Easter sermon that made us in the office think that he had added another
dream to his world. It was a curious thing for Mehronay to write;
indeed, few people in town realised that he did write it; for he had
been rollicking over town on his beat every day for months after the
revival, and half the pious people in town thought he shammed his
emotion the night he came to the church merely to mock them and their
revivalist. But we in the office knew that Mehronay's Easter sermon had
come as the offering of a contrite heart. It is in so many scrapbooks in
the town that it should be reprinted here that the town may know that
Mehronay wrote it. It read:
"The celebration of Easter is the celebration of the renewal of life
after the death that prevails in winter. People of many faiths observe a
spring festival of rejoicing, and of prayer for future bounty. Probably
the Easter celebration is like that at Christmas and Thanksgiving--a
survival of some ancient pagan rite that men established out of
overflowing hearts, rejoicing at the end of a good season and praying
for favour at the beginning of a new one.
"To the Christian world Easter symbolises a Divine tragedy. The coming
of Easter, as it is set forth in the Great Book, is a most powerful
story; it is the story of one of the deepest passions that may move the
human heart--the passion of father-love.
"Once there lived in the desert a man and his little child--a very
little boy, who sometimes was a bad little boy, and who did not do as he
was told. On a day when the father was away about his business the
child, playing, wandered out on the desert and was lost. From home the
desert beckoned the little boy; it seemed fair and fine to adventure in.
When the boy had been gone for many hours the father returned and could
not find him, and knew that the child was lost. But the father knew the
desert; he knew how it lured men on; he knew its parching thirst; he
knew its thorns and brambles, and its choking dust and the heat that
beats one down.
"And when he saw that the boy was lost his heart was aflame with
anguish; he could all but feel the desert fire in the little boy's
blood, the cactus barbs in the bleeding little feet, and the great
lonesomeness of the desert in the little boy's heart; and as from afar
the man heard a wailing little voice in his ears calling, 'Father,
father!' like a lost sheep. But it was only a seeming, and the house
where the little boy had played was silent.
"Then the father went to the desert, and neither the desert fire
murmuring at his brow, nor the sand that filled his mouth, nor the
stones and prickles that cut his feet, nor the wild beasts that lurked
upon the hillsides, could keep out of his ears the bleat of that little
child's voice crying 'Father, father!' When the night fell, still and
cold and numbing, the father pressed on, calling to the child in his
agony; for he thought it was such a little boy, such a poor, lonesome,
terror-stricken little boy out in the desert, lost and in pain, crying
for help, with no one to hear.
"And wandering so, the father died, with his heart full of unspeakable
woe. But they found the wayward child in the light of another day. And
he never knew what his father suffered, nor why his father died, nor did
he understand it all till he had grown to a man's stature, and then he
knew; and he tried to live his days as his father had lived, and to lay
down his life, if need be, for his friend.
"This is the Easter story that should come to every heart. The Christ
that came into the desert of this weary life, and walked here foot-sore,
heart-broken and athirst, came here for the love that was in His heart.
Who put it there--whether the God that gave Shakespeare his brain and
Wagner his harmonies, gave Christ His heart--or whether it was the God
that paints the lily and moves the mountains in their labours--it
matters not. It is one God, the Author and First Cause of all things. It
is His heart that moves our own hearts to all their aspirations, to all
the benevolence that the wicked world knows; it is His mind that is made
manifest in our marvels of civilisation; it is His vast, unknowable plan
that is moving the nations of the earth.
"Whether it be spirit or law or tendency or person--what matter?--it is
our Father, who went to the desert to find His sheep."
All day Saturday, in order to square himself with the printers who set
up his sermon, and to rehabilitate himself in the graces of the others
about the office who knew of his weakness, Mehronay turned in the gayest
lot of copy that he had ever written. There was an "assessment call of
the Widowers' Protective Association to pay the sad wedding loss of
Brother P. R. Cullom, of the Bee Hive," whose wedding was announced in
the society column; there was a card of thanks from Ben Pore to those
who had come with their sympathy and glue to nurse his wooden Indian
which had blown down and broken the night before, and resolutions of
respect for the same departed brother, in most mocking language, from
the Red Men's Lodge. There was an item saying seven different varieties
of Joneses and three kinds of Hugheses were in town from Lebo--the Welsh
settlement; there was a call for the uniformed rank of head waiters to
meet in regalia at Mrs. Larrabee's reception, signed by the three men in
town who were known to have evening clothes, and there was a meeting of
the anti-kin society announced to discuss the length of time
Alphabetical Morrison's new son-in-law should be allowed to visit the
Morrisons before the neighbours could ask when he was going to leave.
But when the paper was out Mehronay got a dozen copies from the press
and sent them away in wrappers which he addressed, and the piece his
blue pencil marked was none of these.
For many days after Mehronay wrote his Easter sermon the gentle, low,
beelike hum that he kept up while he was at work followed the tunes of
gospel hymns, or hymns of an older fashion. We always knew when to
expect what he called a "piece" from Mehronay--which meant an article
into which he put more than ordinary endeavour--for his bee-song would
grow louder, with now and then an intelligible word in it, and if it was
to be an exceptional piece Mehronay would whistle. When he began writing
the music would die down, but when he was well under sail on his
"piece," the steam of his swelling emotions would set his chin to going
like the lid of a kettle, and he would drone and jibber the words as he
wrote them--half audibly, humming and sputtering in the pauses while he
thought. Scores of times we have seen the dear old fellow sitting at his
desk when a "piece" was in the pot, and have gathered the men around
back of his chair to watch him simmer. When it was finished he would
whirl about in his chair, as he gathered up the sheets of paper and
shook them together, and say: "I've writ a piece here--a damn good
piece!" And then, as he put the copy on the hook and got his hat, he
would tell us in most profane language what it was all about--quoting
the best sentences and chuckling to himself as he went out onto the
street.
As the spring filled out and became summer we noticed that Mehronay was
singing fewer gospel hymns and rather more sentimental songs than usual.
And then the horrible report came to the office that Mehronay had been
seen by one of the printers walking by night after bed-time under the
State Street elms with a woman. Also his items began to indicate a
closer knowledge of what was going on in society than Mehronay naturally
could have. In the fall we learned through the girls in the Bee Hive
that he had bought a white shirt and a pair of celluloid cuffs. This
rumour set the office afire with curiosity, but no one dared to tease
Mehronay. For no one knew who she was.
Not until late in the fall, when Madame Janauschek came to the opera
house to play "Macbeth," did Mehronay uncover his intrigue. Then for
the first time in his three years' employment on the paper he asked for
two show tickets! The entire office lined up at the opera house--most of
us paying our own way, not to see the Macbeths, but to see Mehronay's
Romeo and Juliet. The office devil, who was late mailing the papers that
night, says that about seven o'clock Mehronay came in singing "Jean,
Jean, my Bonnie Jean," and that he went to his trunk, took out his
celluloid cuffs, a new sky-blue and shell-pink necktie that none of us
had seen before, a clean paper collar--and the boy, who probably was
mistaken, swears Mehronay also took his white shirt--in a bundle which
he proudly tucked under his arm and toddled out of the office whistling
a wedding march. An hour later, dressed in this regalia and a new black
suit, buttoned primly and exactly in a fashion unknown to Mehronay, he
appeared at the opera house with Miss Columbia Merley, spinster, teacher
of Greek and Hellenic philosophy at the College. The office force asked
in a gasp of wonder: "Who dressed him?" Miss Merley--late in her
forties, steel-eyed, thin-chested, flint-faced and with hair knotted so
tightly back from her high stony brow that she had to take out two
hairpins to wink--Miss Merley might have done it--but she had no kith or
kin who could have done it for her, and certainly the hand that smoothed
the coat buttoned the vest, and the hand that buttoned the vest put on
the collar and tie, and as for the shirt----
But that was an office mystery. We never have solved it, and no one had
the courage to tease Mehronay about it the next morning. After that we
knew, and Mehronay knew that we knew, that he and Miss Merley went to
church every Sunday evening--the Presbyterian church, mind you, where
there is no foolishness--and that after church Mehronay always spent
exactly half an hour in the parlour of the house where his divinity
roomed. A whole year went by wherein Mehronay was sober, and did not
look upon the wine when it was red or brown or yellow or any other
colour. Now when he "writ a piece" there was frequently something in it
defending women's rights. Also he severed diplomatic relations with the
girl clerks in the White Front and the Bee Hive and the Racket, and
bought a cane and aspired to some dignity of person. But Mehronay's
heart was unchanged. The snows of boreal affection did not wither or
fade his eternal spring. The sap still ran sweet in his veins and the
bees still sang among the blossoms that sprang up along his path. He was
everyone's friend, and spoke cheerily to the dogs and the horses, and
was no more courteous to the preachers and the bankers, who are our most
worshipful ones in town, than to the men from Red Martin's
gambling-room, and even the woman in red, whom all the town knows but
whom no one ever mentions, got a kind word from Mehronay as they met
upon the street. He always called her sister.
And so another year went by and Mehronay's "pieces" made the circulation
grow, and we were prosperous. It became known about town long before we
knew it in the office that if Mehronay kept sober for three years she
would have him, and when we finally heard it he was on the last half of
the third year and was growing sombre. "In the Cottage by the Sea" was
his favourite song, and "Put Away the Little Playthings" also was much
in his throat when he wrote. We thought, perhaps--and now we know--that
he was thinking of a home that was gone. The day before Mehronay's
wedding a child died over near the railroad, and on the morning he was
to be married we found this on the copy hook when we came down to open
the office, after Mehronay had gone to claim his bride:
"A ten-line item appeared in last night's paper, away down in one
corner, that brought more hearts together in a common bond--the bond of
fear and sympathy and sorrow--than any other item has done for a long
time. The item told of the death, by scarlet fever, of little Flossie
Yengst. Probably the child was not known outside of her little group of
playmates; her father and mother are not of that advertised clique known
of men as prominent people; he is an engineer on the Santa Fe, and the
mother moves in that small circle of friends and neighbours which
circumscribes American motherhood of the best type. And yet last night,
when that little ten-line item was read by a thousand firesides in this
town, thousands and thousands of hearts turned to that desolate home by
the track, and poured upon it the benediction of their sympathies. That
home was the meeting-place where rich and poor, great and weak, good and
bad, stood equals. For there is something in the death of a little
child, something in its infinite pathos, that makes all human creatures
mourn. Because in every heart that is not a dead heart, calloused to all
joy or sorrow, some little child is enshrined--either dead or
living--and so child-love is the one universal emotion of the soul, and
child-death is the saddest thing in all the world.
"A child's soul is such a small thing, and the world and the systems of
worlds, and the infinite stretches of illimitable space, are so wide for
a child's soul to wander in, that, sane as we may be, stolid as we may
try to be, we think in imagery, and the figure of little feet setting
off on the far track to the end of things, hunting God, wrings our
heart-strings and makes our throats grip and our eyelids quiver.
"And then a child dying, leaving this good world of ours, seems to have
had so small a chance for itself. There is something in all of us
struggling against oblivion, striving vainly to make some real impress
on the current of time, and a child, dying, can only clutch the hands
about it and go down--forever. It seems so merciless, so unfair. Perhaps
that is why, all over the world, the little graves are cared for best.
It is to the little graves that we turn in our keenest anguish and not
to the larger mounds; to the little graves that our hearts are drawn in
our hours of triumph. And so the child, though dead, lives its appointed
time and dies only in the fullness of its years. The little shoes, the
little dresses, the 'little tin soldiers covered with rust,' and the
memories sweeter than dreams of a honeymoon, these are life's
immortelles that never fade. And though men and women come and go upon
the earth, though civilisations may wither and pass, these little images
remain; and the sun and the stars, which see men come and go, may see
these little idols before which every creature bows, and the sun and
stars, knowing no time, may think these children's relics are also
eternal.
"It is a desperately lonely home, that Yengst home, with the little girl
gone away on a long journey; but how tight and close other fathers and
mothers hugged their little ones last night when their hearts came back
from the house of sorrow. And the little ones, feeling no fear,
unconscious of the pang of terror that was shooting through the souls
about them--the children played on, and maybe, before dropping to sleep,
wondered a little at anxious looks they saw in grown-up eyes.
"This is the faith of a little child, curious but implicit, in the
goodness of those things outside one's self. And 'of such is the Kingdom
of Heaven.'"
A day or so after the wedding someone said to him: "Mehronay, sometimes
your pieces make me cry," and he replied with all the fine sincerity of
his heart showing in his eyes: "Yes--and if you only knew how they make
me cry! Sometimes when I have written one like--like that--I go to my
bed and sob like a child." He turned and walked away, but he came into
the office whistling "The Dutch Company."
After his wedding we made brave, in a sly way, to rail at Mehronay about
his love affair, and he took it good-naturedly. He knew the situation
just as it was; his sense of humour allowed him no false view of the
matter. One afternoon when the paper was out, George Kirwin, the
foreman, and one of the reporters and Mehronay were in the back room
leaning against the imposing-stones looking over the paper, when Kirwin
said: "Say, Mehronay, how did you get yourself screwed up to ask her?"
It was spoken in a joke. The two young men were grinning, but Mehronay
looked at the floor in a study as he said:
"Well, to be honest--damfino if I ever did--just exactly." He smiled
reflectively in a pause and continued: "Nearest I remember was one night
we was sitting with our feet on the base-burner and I looked up and
says, 'Hell's afire, Commie'--I called her that for short--'why in the
devil don't a fine woman like you get married? She got up and come over
to where I was a-sitting and before I could say Lordamighty, she put her
hand on my shoulder and says real soft and solemn: 'I'll just be damned
if I don't believe I will.'"
He did not smile when he looked up, but sighed contentedly as he added
reverently: "And so, by hell, she did!" If Columbia Merley Mehronay had
known this language which her husband's innocent inadvertence put into
her mouth she would have strangled him--even then.
We did not have Mehronay with us more than a year after his wedding.
Mrs. Mehronay knew what he was worth. She asked for twenty-five dollars
a week for him, and when we told her the office could not afford it she
took him away. They went to New York City, where she peddled his pieces
about town until she got him a regular place. There they have lived
happily ever after. Mehronay brings his envelope home every Saturday
night, and she gives him his carfare and his shaving-money and puts the
rest where it will do the most good. When the men from our office go to
New York--which they sometimes do--they visit with Mehronay at his
office, and sometimes--if there is time for due and proper notice of the
function in writing--there is an invitation to dinner. Mehronay fondles
his old friends as a child fondles its playmates and he takes eager
pleasure in them, but she that was Columbia Merley all but searches
their pockets for the tempter.
Mehronay has never broken his word. He knows if he does break it she
will tear him limb from limb and eat him raw. So he goes to his work,
writes his pieces, hums his gentle bee-song--so that men do not like to
room with him at the office--and has learned to keep himself fairly well
buttoned up in the great city. But Miss Larrabee that was--who used to
edit the society page for our paper, but who now lives in New York--told
us when she was home that as she was walking down Fourth Avenue one
winter day when the street was empty, she saw Mehronay standing before
the window of a liquor store looking intently at the display of bottled
goods before him. When he saw her half a block away he turned from her
and shuffled rapidly down the street, clicking his cane nervously.
It was not for him!
XVIII
Sown in Our Weakness